Portfolio Prioritization & Ranking Board

The problem this kills

Portfolio decisions get made in hallways. The loudest sponsor, the most recent fire, or whoever is in the room wins the next slot - and three months later nobody can explain why a low-value project got funded while a quick win sat in the backlog.

You probably already have the raw material: a spreadsheet of initiatives, some sense of value and effort, and a rough idea of how much capacity your teams actually have. What you don't have is a shared, defensible way to put it all on one board, draw the line at "here's what we can afford this quarter," and have your steering committee approve it - with a recorded reason every time someone overrules the math.

This plan builds you exactly that: a ranking board where the score is transparent, the cut-line is visible, overrides are logged, and the approved plan is one click from a CSV your PMO can act on.

What you'll build

A private web app for your PMO or steering committee that:

• Imports your initiative list from a CSV or Google Sheet - no integration required to start.
• Scores and ranks every initiative using an editable model (value, strategic fit, and effort, weighted however your organization decides).
• Draws a capacity cut-line - everything above the line fits within your available capacity and is "funded"; everything below is "deferred."
• Lets the committee review the board, drag items across the line, and record a required reason for every override.
• Locks an approved portfolio plan behind a human approval gate, then exports it as a clean CSV in the columns your downstream systems expect.

It's realistic for a weekend of building - and it's yours, tailored to how your organization actually scores work.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single file you paste into Claude Code (a free AI coding agent). It walks the agent through the whole build, step by step, each step ending in a ready-to-paste prompt.

Crucially, the plan opens by interviewing you about your business - your current prioritization process, the systems and spreadsheets you use, the exact fields and naming in your initiative data, your typical and peak portfolio size, your scoring and approval rules, and your messy edge cases. It reflects a short tailored spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds a single screen. You get a tool shaped around your portfolio, not a generic template.

Inside you'll find: the discovery interview, the data model, the editable scoring engine, the capacity cut-line logic, the committee review board with override-reason capture, the approval gate, email notifications, and the CSV export - plus a "how to know it works" checklist and a no-API fallback so you can build it today.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. The plan bakes in the controls a PMO needs to trust the output:

• Login so only your team can open the board.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own portfolio.
• A complete audit trail - who scored what, who moved an item across the line, who approved the plan, and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate - the tool ranks and proposes, but nothing becomes the "approved portfolio plan" until the committee signs off.
• A required reason for every override - move an item across the cut-line and the board makes you say why, on the record.
• Duplicate guards - dedupe on initiative ID so the same project can't sneak onto the board twice.

Who it's for

PMO leads, portfolio managers, executives, and steering committees who are tired of prioritization-by-volume and want a defensible, repeatable board where capacity, value, and accountability all live in one place.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the interview tailor the rest.